Buy Now: Creative Marketing that Gets Customers to Respond to You and Your Product

Chapter 14. Offer Is King

We have been around this industry since the beginning; we know just about everybody. Internally, it is a surprisingly friendly industry where most of the players know each other, golf together at industry events, and sit elbow to elbow at dinners a few times a year. We applaud success for one another, because sooner or later everyone gets to hit one out of the park. In almost every senior creative person's office, somewhere there will be a plaque a sign or a moniker of some sort that reads, "Offer Is King."

Offer is the single most malleable driver of calls and sales volume you will have at your disposal when you create a DRTV commercial. You must be prepared to have a number of offers to test. If you are a corporate marketing person, if you are an inventor, do this:

Get out your scissors and cut out the sentence shown here in boldface and all caps. Then, just like you would the slip of paper from a fortune cookie, tape it to your computer monitor. You will read it and, initially, have resistance; but you must, must believe us when we say this:

WHEN YOU TEST A LONG-FORM SHOW, ALWAYS MAKE THE MOST CONSUMER-FRIENDLY OFFER YOU CAN IN YOUR FIRST TEST.

Read it again.

One more time.

You will always be tempted to test first an offer that makes you the most money up front. That temptation is driven by ego, an ego that tells you, "If I have made a great show, people will beat a path to my door and cough up the full cash price, now! That's, frankly, not smart, and it's ...